Dead on My Feet by Konrath J.A

Author:Konrath, J.A.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Published: 2017-04-29T04:00:00+00:00

I’ve never owned a new car. I’ve never even shopped for a new car. My financial situation from birth had fluctuated between white trash poverty and lower middle class.

So even though I’d heard about the legendary appeal of new car smell, I hadn’t actually experienced it.

I’ve been missing out. New cars smelled amazing.

They also drove amazing. The car was so comfortable, I felt like General Motors had taken a cast of my body and built a vehicle around it. And it was loaded. All leather. Power everything. State of the art GPS. A speaker system that made my Bronco’s stereo sound like an AM clock radio from 1983.

My first instinct was to take the Caddy straight to Manny’s place, trade the painting for a shitload of drugs, dump the car at a chop shop, and then party until I was comatose or dead.

Earl agreed with me. We celebrated by taking four tramadol, which was an opiate I’d never had the pleasure of spending time with, downing them with a slug of Patron Platinum, which was a tequila so smooth that I immediately ranked it as the best thing I’d ever put in my mouth.

I tooled around the burbs, getting a feel for the car. Played with the GPS, figuring out how to punch in coordinates using the touch screen. Let the radio automatically roam stations until I found an oldies song I liked. Drank more tequila.

A cop pulled up alongside me at a red light. I winked at him. He went his way, I went mine.

The tramadol is nice.

“Yeah it is.”

The opiate haze was settling over me like a soft, tingly blanket. Not as wavy as a oxycodone buzz. I wondered if Manny sold tramadol.

Of course he did. Dude had everything.

Like the sex worker, the drug dealer should not only be able to sell his wares without archaic, puritanical laws getting in the way, but should also be a revered professional in the community. Rules to protect people from themselves, and prohibit what they do with their own bodies, are bullshit. People are going to do what they want to do. Making it illegal doesn’t stop it, or even make it harder to get. All it does is populate the prisons with non-violent offenders, and stigmatize the poor bastards whose only crime is wanting a brief reprieve from reality.

I fully understand addiction, being an addict myself. But don’t let the medical community con you into believing addiction is a disease. It’s a choice, pure and simple. Cancer is not a choice.

Being unwilling to stop using isn’t the same thing as being unable to stop. If your addiction kills you, you made bad choices. Probably a good thing you got out of the gene pool before adding more addicted losers to the world population.

That’s why I wore condoms. Not because I feared a sexually transmitted disease. But because I was doing humanity a favor by not procreating.

You should cool it on the tramadol.

I realized I’d taken two more without even thinking about it.

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